Hey Cicakchanson,
That’s awesome and extremely helpful. I’m sure that’s going to be benficial to a lot of people.
As for your question, you can customize the template by creating a ‘timeline-express’ directory in your theme, and creating the proper files.
Take a look at the documentation we have setup on the topic:
https://www.wp-timelineexpress.com/documentation/customize-single-announcement-template/
You could just copy single.php, rename it appropriately and switch out the one function in the file and you’d be good to go.
Thanks,
Evan
Also Cicakchanson,
If you’re using Posts in Page to output the data via shortcode, you may want to create a custom output template as described in the Posts in Page FAQ.
Disclaimer: I know nothing about the timelineexpress plugin. 🙂
Hi Eric-
Thanks for that suggestion. I’ll try both using Post in Page and Timeline Express to generate my template and get back to everyone on what seems to work best. I’m also considering the use of the Redirection plugin when i have the template working so that anyone clicking on an excerpt in the timeline is taken directly to the post that I pulled into the announcement via Post in Page. That might seem like overkill but I don’t want some of my users liking or commenting on the Timeline Announcement post generated by Posts in Page whereas others are actually on the original WordPress generated Post. With this method I’ll still need to pull the posts into Timeline Announcements because I need the excerpts that Timeline Express generates on the timeline to look and function correctly.
I do wonder if pulling my posts using Posts in Page into Timeline Announcements might work both ways. So when someone comments on the Timeline Announcement it might also get ‘pulled’ onto the original WordPress generated post which would negate the need for the Redirection plugin. I’ll check for that possibility before using Redirection. I also need to make sure Redirection doesn’t in some way ruin my SEO but I don’t think it should. In any case I’ll come back to the forum and tell everyone how this pans out so that nobody has to spend the time I did trying to figure out how to do this.
best- Karl
When I tried following the directions HERE to create a custom Timeline Express Template I got a strange post in post phenomenon where the layout of the timeline announcement accurately mirrored my theme but the content had a shadow box around it and, in some cases, duplicated items on my page (like 2 sets of social media icons appearing at the end of my post / although I knew this was the result of the settings of a social media plugin I’m running).
I then tried using the Posts-in-Page template setup suggested by Eric from Posts in Page. Unfortunately I could not get this solution to even approach viability but please know that this is because my PHP skills are very rudimentary so I am completely willing to admit this is a problem with me and not the plugin. In fact, as I was working my wife brought me some coffee so this plugin (as claimed) might actually make coffee too!! I did have to delete the ‘meta’ section in the posts_loop_template.php files because this was one of the items that was being duplicated before moving on.
I went back to using the Timeline Express custom template method and decided that I could clean up some of the oddities with the content via CSS. This ended up working beautifully (the :nth-of-type() selector was very useful in clearing up duplicates) so now the Announcement Post format and content are indistinguishable from the WordPress Post format and content.
It turns out that commenting on the Announcement Post does not transfer to the WordPress Post (or vise versa). This makes sense and now I’ll experiment with the Redirection plugin to complete my work around.
Next I’ll be trying to clean up the appearance of the excerpt that’s displayed on the timeline itself since it looks a bit wonky. The announcement excerpt on the timeline has no text in it since the only thing on the actual announcement page (in the backend) is a short code for Pages in Posts. I imagine I can fix this too so I’ll add to this thread when I complete that bit.
Still, the major bit is done and was a success. You can indeed use Posts in Pages to mirror your theme’s post template format and pull the content of your posts into a Timeline Express announcement.
With this success under my belt I’d like to thank Eric from Posts in Page and Evan from Timeline Express. You guys rock.
Best-
Karl
Awesome, thank you for posting that detailed explination. I’m sure that’s going to help some other people out moving forward.
If you run into any issues or anything feel free to post here.
Thanks again, and thank you so much for your review!
Evan
